In the late 1940s—when computer engineers were grappling with unreliable hardware and noisy transmission environments—a team of engineers inside a modest lab at the University of Manchester , England, confronted a problem so fundamental that it threatened the viability of digital computing itself. Machines could generate bits, but they could not reliably read them back. The inconsistent reading back of memory data did not initially present itself as a grand theoretical challenge. It showed up as something more mundane: inconsistent computing results. Engineers including Frederic C. Williams , Tom Kilburn , and G. E. (Tommy) Thomas traced the failures not to logic errors but to the physical behavior of the machines themselves. The team devised a technique for keeping a transmitter and a receiver synchronized without relying on a separate clock signal.…